Here are some of the movies Vancouverists can see on the big screen this weekend, September 5 through 7.

As old as its cast, the run of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skullis reaching Methusalan proportions. You can still catch it at the now air-conditioned Kiggins theater downtown. Animation buffs instead can catch Kung Fu Panda with the voices Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman and Angelina Jolie and Jackie Chan. Admission is $4.

Cinetopia offers Babylon A. D., Bangkok Dangerous, Fly Me to the Moon, Hamlet 2, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Dark Knight, Traitor, and Tropic Thunder. The Regal Cascade Stadium 16 Cinemas is showing Bangkok Dangerous, College, Death Race, Disaster Movie, Hamlet 2, Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, Mamma Mia!, Pineapple Express, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Step Brothers, The Dark Knight, The House Bunny, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, Traitor, Tropic Thunder, and WALL-E, while the Regal Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema has some of the same titles plus Babylon A.D. and Hancock.

Meanwhile, a few short miles away, the Hollywood Theater offers the critically acclaimed Frozen River plus the Herzog documentary Encounters at the End of the Worldand the Cinema 21 has The Edge of Heaven, which follows the intersecting lives of six people (four Turks and two Germans, including Hanna Schygulla). The all-digital Living Room Theaters is featuring Love Comes Lately, a revival of the ’50s sci fi film Forbidden Planet, Kabluey, The Grocer’s Son, War, Inc., and Priceless.

There must be a viewer out there somewhere who has never seen a movie where a guy goes off to search a scary building only to have his flashlight immediately die on him. I’ve seen, say, 50 such scenes. But for that one person who hasn’t seen the old flashlight-goes-out-at-the-worst-moment trick (a distant cousin of the perfectly in shape car that won’t start when you’re trying to flee) Mirrors is probably the perfect introduction.

This mythical viewer probably also won’t be familiar with the fact that Mirrors is an adaptation of the Korean horror film Geoul sokeuro, which was set in a new department store about to open, while this one takes place in an old burnt out department store that’s never been repaired. This dense viewer probably also won’t get the references to Candyman or The Shining. But they will recognize it as an awful lot like a humorless version of Night in the Museum..

In a set up not unlike that for Night in the Museum, Kiefer plays a weaking, a central hero with a lot of problems. He’s a divorced cop suspended over the disputed killing of a fellow cop and who sleeps on his sister’s (Amy Smart) couch while reduced to working as a night watchman in the burnt out department store that in its distant past was once a hospital. There he discovers mirrors that go boo in the night. It’s not plausibly explained, but apparently your reflection in a mirror can turn evil, and make the real person do terrible things to herself, such as making Kiefer’s sister Angela tear her own jaw wide open. How the evil mirror people can leap from the burnt out department store to Kiefer’s sister’s apartment is also not clear. Keifer soon turns Jack Torrance as he investigates the store’s sordid past.

Mirrors grows very boring as it follows Kiefer, still in anguished character from 24, wandering around the museum at night looking at mirrors, searching out the source of screams, then trying to break or shoot out the main evil mirror which has strangely regenerative powers, then yelling at people such as his unsympathetic doctor ex-wife (Paula Patton) as he tries to accumulate information. As with most J-Horror sources and knock offs, here is a lot of water at the end.

Alexandre Aja directed Mirrors from a script credited to Gregory Levasseur and himself. Aja also did High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes remake, and the parking garage suspenser P 2, which suggests a path of diminishing returns. But for those utterly unfamiliar with the horror genre and its well-worn tricks, it will all be wondrously new.

Two events prompt this review of Traitor, one being the continual undermining of movie plots by trailers, and the recent death of the voice king of the classic modern trailer, Don LaFontaine. LaFontaine was the deep-voiced master of enunciating those dualities found in the arts of the Miramax trailer, blather such as “In a time of war, two brothers are torn apart by their love of the same woman … ” blah blah blah. He made such gibberish sound portentous, but I wouldn’t say he was popular. Rather, once that deep growl came on the soundtrack, you knew you were getting spin on the latest empty and commercialized pabulum.

But LaFontaine isn’t the only problem with trailers. They also have a predictable two part structure, the second half speedier than the first; and they reveal too much. The trailer makers don’t realize that we modern viewers are more sophisticated than they think, that we can quickly piece a movie together from the fragments the trailer offers, and worse, that we can “see” around the slivers of clips to the material just before and after it that they aren’t showing us. We can mentally flesh out the “boring” parts withheld by the trailer cutters. But worse, the trailer makers have no hesitation in sharing crucial plot points and giving the punchlines to gags.

Not that people in the audience still don’t laugh uproariously at the Julia-Roberts-falling-out-of-bed-answering-the-’phone gag in the movie that they have seen a hundred times in the trailer or the commercial. Perhaps audiences are comforted by the lack of surprise, perhaps they can’t take suspense, it’s too hard on their cholesterol hardened hearts and shattered nerves barely held in control by valium derivatives. While on the one hand we live in an age of spoiler paranoia, where every website must pay obeisance to those misguided viewers who seemingly want to know zero about any cultural product they may run into, on the other, the very manufacturers of those cultural products spoil the hell out of them through overly detailed trailers and mystique wrecking making ofs on DVDs. Thus, the trailer for Traitor reveals that the main character Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) is not really the traitor of the title, that he is a agent being run by Carter (Jeff Daniels). Oh, for the days when Kubrick supervised every aspect of his films, down to the trailers themselves.

We learn this about half way through the movie. Traitor Horn, who is half Sudanese, and half American, has somehow become an undercover agent. His controller is Daniels, who is the only person who knows that Horn exists or that he is a “good guy.” As in any good Fritz Lang or Samuel Fuller noir, of course we know that Daniels will die, leaving Horn on the hook, with no one to believe his real story. Still, he goes ahead with the plot he has fallen into, which is to help plant bombs on 50 American buses, one in each state, to ignite simultaneously. As a bus rider, I hope real terrorists don’t take to this idea, as they may have taken to the ideas in Tom Clancy’s novel Debt of Honor, in which planes hijacked by terrorists fly into Washington monuments.

Traitor is a fast paced techno-thriller, with lots of montage sequences of bombs and Islamacists fanned out everywhere. It goes into details about how bombs are made and how terrorists can communicate with each other off the grid via email and things like that. It’s easier to understand than, say, Syriana because it traffics in a lot of standard situations of the genre. Two FBI cops (Guy Pearce, who is looking surprisingly broad shouldered and American these days, and Neal McDonough) are standard issue; when they talk to suspects, like Samir’s mother and girlfriend, their interlocutors talk back sassy in a way only found in movies and Law and Order. When Samir goes undercover in prison he has to beat up the toughest guy on the yard to prove his worth. There’s even one of those transition shots that starts out with water rushing by before the camera tilts up to show an approaching city.

Fortunately, as in the brilliant trailer for Speed, the Traitor trailer makers deigned to withhold one or two surprises, though not enough to create the heightened suspense the film needs to work. I guess we know who the real traitors are here.

As a fan of British crime dramas, I’m wondering why it took me so long to find Midsomer Murders. After all, it has been on British television for 11 years, and is as popular as the now defunct Inspector Morris and Foyle’s War. The boxes issued by Acorn, by the way, do not correspond to the show as aired in England (though it may correspond to the A&E Channel airings). The set consists of the first four episodes of the eight episode season nine, from 2005.

In fact, Midsomer Murders sharews some DNA with Foyle’s War. Writer Anthony Horowitz was one of Midsomer’s three initial creators when the series first aired back in July of 1998. Later he broke off to do five or six (depending on which country you are in) seasons of similarly structured Foyle’s. Both shows are set in a rural area, whose primary detective is a laconic and cryptic cop. The lush greenery and the quaint cottages are contrasted with the seething rages and class hatreds that so often erupt. If Midsomer’s Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) is more homey and amusing, his show also lacks the burden of recreating a whole era 50 years on.

Midsomer is a county that contains such villages as Causton, where Barnaby lives and which is his base of operations, Badger’s Drift down southernly, Midsomer Barton, and other quaintly named municipalities, all accessible via winding sidewalk-free roads. It’s not clear exactly where Midsomer might be found in reality, unlike, say, Hardy’s Wessex, a transparent map of which could be laid down upon Dorset with ghostly alignment, but it seems to be in the countryside to the northeast of London, where the series is actually shot. Each of this small townships is rife with competition, the clash between the old ways and modernization, and the upper classes not bashful about showing their contempt for the lower orders, who are practically in their pockets.

Barnaby has apparently had a succession of partners, and Midsomer Murders Set Eleven (Acorn Media, four discs, $49.95, street date, Tuesday, October 10, 2008) begins with him acquiring a new one, DS Ben Jones (Jason Hughes). Barnaby also has a wife and adult daughter but you don’t see too much of them in this quartet of movie length episodes. Barnaby encounters Jones as a mere cop at the start of “The House in the Woods,” one of several “scary,” and autumnal Midsomer episodes. That the mystery, when solved, and like Foyle’s War the mysteries tend to be clever and surprising in their resolution (though there are a few disappointing climaxes that leave you wanted more), proves to be multigenerational is characteristic of the show’s template, perhaps inspired by the later novels of Ross MacDonald. Generally, the current mysteries are the modern residue of actions taken one, two, many generations ago. “Dead Letters” concerns the current murders erupting in a village during its annual celebration all inspired by the death of a beauty queen many years earlier. Like most episodes, the show features at least one familiar face or prominent actor, in this case Simon Callow, actor and author of a massive biography of Orson Welles. “Vixen’s Run” concerns the implications of a will left behind by a rambunctious patriarch (Joss Ackland). “Down Among the Dead Men” shows how deep into the past the cruelty of a local blackmailer can reach. This episode also stars Paul Freeman, late of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Hot Fuzz. Each episode is clever and charming, and instantly addictive.

Most of the supplementary material on the four discs is text oriented press release type material, with the exception of a section that links up with the pilot, by showing scenes from “The Killings at Badger’s Drift,” which uses two of the same actors in similar roles.

Put Midsomer Murders Set Eleven in your Netflix cue now.

Boy, it’s taken me a long time to get around to Tropic Thunder, which has been one of the top movies for the past three weeks. I’m not even sure I have anything interesting to say about the comedy, but here goes anyway.

At root, Tropic Thunder is a glorified version of those instant movie parodies such as Meet the Spartans, that offer a potpourri of parody skewering recent film trends, with the difference that TT is legitimately funny on several levels at once, and tells a coherent and amusing story, It also initiates a fun game of trying to isolate real life analogs for its fictional characters.

Co-writer and director Ben Stiller, raised in a show biz family and a lifelong comic performer, has a long history of close observation and family lore to draw upon in his directed films, which are usually about performance, media, and playacting in some way, a perfect example being his unheralded masterpiece, the Jim Carrey more-than-just-a-vehicle flop <emCable Guy. In Tropic Thunder Stiller plays Tug Speedman, a former action star of the series Scorcher whose attempt to “stretch as an actor” and Oscar-whore in a movie called Simple Jack as a mentally disabled farm hand who can talk to horses has failed miserably. Clearly partially modeled on both Bruce Willis and Sean Penn, Tug’s jealousy and insipid comments on the art of acting place him in the ranks of thousands of useless aspirant actors in La La Land. As Tropic Thunder opens, Tug is in a Vietnam movie, shooting an elaborate Apocalypse Now style scene that shows how his character, Four Leaf Tayback, lost his hands. The movie is based on the ‘Nam memoir of the “real” Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte) who is probably about the 12th movie character based on John Milius, and the first based on the James Frey - J. T. LeRoy scandals.

His nemesis on the set is five time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus (a typically brilliant Robert Downey, Jr.), a blend of Russel Crowe (he is a tempestuous Australian) and De Niro, because Lazarus undergoes a controversial Black Like Me style operation that darkens his skin so he can play his character as an African-American, though one with a tendency to quote the lyfics from The Jeffersons, and borrow riffs from Benson.

Thanks to a de Millian level set error the movie within the movie, called Tropic Thunder, is now $15 million dollars behind schedule on its first day, and studio executive Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) , via satellite conference, pays the key grip to punch the director, Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) in the face. The idea for saving the movie, however, comes from Tayback, who advocates that Damien take his raw cast of five out into the jungle and shoot the rest of the movie Blair Witch style. Unfortunately, Damien is blown up by an old French land mine on the first day of this new type of shooting, and the actors slip into a real war zone, one controlled by drug kingpin in the golden triangle.

Tropic Thunder ends up being Galaxy Quest in ‘Nam, but is just as funny, which the best single moment Downey’s analysis as to who and why some actors get Oscars for playing retarded characters and some don’t. But one of the biggest pleasures for those who like to think of themselves as insiders is trying to guess the real life analogs to some of the Hollywood bigwigs obviously mocked by the movie. For example, some have said that Damien Cockburn is supposed to be Sam Mendes, but that doesn’t quite ring true to me. Meanwhile, I think Les Grossman is supposed to be Rob Reiner, but no one believes me. By the way, the lockstep reviewers have said with uniformity that Cruise’s “cameo” is going to revive his career. Not only do I not think this is true, but as a Cruise supporter, at least on the screen, it came as no surprise that he could make an astounding comic turn (maybe he thought he was doing Sumner Redstone).

I was rather started the other day to read this confession by Mike White, the editor of Cashiers du Cinemart, one of the most interesting and ecclectic of cultural ‘zines. For the past few years, it turns out, White was also the brains behind the graymail website SuperHappyFun.com. As he closes down his version of the site (someone else is carrying on the idea), he finally admits his involvement, how it came about, and what it meant to him.

I bought a few graymail discs off of the website, because I couldn’t find the films I needed for a book project anywhere else. The depth of the site’s elsewhere unavailable films was fairly deep, and after that I checked it occasionally for updates, when I wasn’t reluctantly walking down the street to Portland’s Movie Madness to get some of its gray market discs or tapes, found mostly in the film noir and Asian action film sections, and reluctantly fielding the inexplicable and unprovoked scorn of its bored clerks (I guess they’d rather be off “rockin’” somewhere). Examples of gray market movies would be Max Ophuls’s two American noirs, the Reckless Moment and Caught, which seem to be neither officially on tape nor DVD, or The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the cult Robert Mitchum film from the 1970s, also not available in any form of home replay.

Discovering that Mike White was also the man behind SuperHappyFun was like discovering that Deep Throat lived down the street, or that AICN’s Alexandra DuPont was someone you know. Suddenly something distant was closer than you thought. Cashiers du Cinemart, now also folded, sadly, was one of the best of the zines. The irregularly published mag’s fields of interest were wide ranging and obviously reflective of White’s eclectic tastes. A given issues could have everything from essays on the films made from mystery writer John D. McDonald’s novels, to an exegesis on the films of the obscure Japanese avant garde filmmaker Shuji Terayama. And like most zines, the magazine contained a blend of personal interests and gross confession (White’s work history, as recounted in one issue, is hilarious). White was an exemplar of zine publishing at its best and most intelligent.

It’s possible to make a name for yourself in the world of zines or, now, their successor, the Internet. It’s hard, but it’s possible. One base criterion is that you have to be good. And you have to have a gimmick. Thus among the movie review-reading cognoscenti the name Vern rises high. A contributor to AICN, Nerve’s The Screengrab, and other sites, including his own, Vern is the new Joe Bob Briggs, a straight talking reviewer who is free of the lockstep that seems to afflict most other reviewers, who take their cues from the New York Times, Variety, or the Village Voice or the cool blog of choice this week. Vern is unashamed of his range of interests, which is mostly action films, is un-self-censored, writes reviews the way most people talk about films (which would get a daily reviewer in trouble, if not fired) and has the wit of a stand up comedian. Vern has been at it for several years, and has now produced a pair of books, one a collection of some 80+ of his best reviews available from Lulu.com, and just recently his magnum opus, Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal. Originally serialized at AICN, the book has been expanded, cleaned up and published by a reputable press that specializes in movie books (Titan Books, 352 pages, $15.95, ISBN-13: 978-1845769277). Titan will be doing all the Watchmen books, for example.

The premise behind Vern’s book, that actors can be just as much the auteur behind their films as directors, is not new. Patrick McGilligan asserted the same thing about James Cagney back in the mid-1970s (even soliciting a generous foreword by auteurism arbiter Andrew Sarris himself). But by carefully collecting and collating recurring motifs, Vern makes a strong case.

And make no mistake, as the once alternative weeklies like to transition, Vern takes Seagal seriously. He makes large claims for the action star, and damned if they don’t make sense within the context of Vern’s hagiography. Vern has drunk the Kool-Aid of Seagal Idolatry. In fact he’s even drunk the Kool-Aid Seagal makes and sells himself, the difficult-to-track down (but Vern found it) energy drink Lightening Bolt. But beneath the bluster and high comedy, Vern has a serious point, exemplified by a paragraph late in the book:

I don’t know why the mono-monikered Vern hides his identity, but a careful reading of Seagalogy, and probably his other reviews, reveals a lot about him: that he lives in Seattle, that his ancestry comes from the Caucasus, that his late adoptive father may have been a soldier or a cop. One doubts that he recently got out of jail and stopped drinking and that he is pursuing a cleaner life, as the original Vern mythos asserted. Other than that, the book is all Seagal, in excrutiating detail. Vern is not an uncritical fan of Seagal, and is wont to call a scene lame if it is. But he follows Seagal from his first film, Above the Law, in which Seagal burst upon the scene virtually fully formed as an action star and as a character, to the string of straight-to-DVD films with which he has been associated during the last decade. Vern also tracks down stray Seagal appearances, such as on a British comedy show and in a cameo in a celebrity wine connoisseur’s laser disc, and the book ends with a charming account of Vern’s attendance at a live performance of Segal and his blues band at a Seattle nightclub, where he finally shakes the hand of his hero. Along the way, Vern charts themes, visual and action motifs, and chronicles the gradual politicizationh of Seagal’s movies from an environmentalist position.

What made his solo name is that Vern is funny. His reviews are like stand up comedy routines. For example in discussing Under Siege, Vern notes that the film’s villain, Tommy Lee Jones, is employing the skills taught him by the CIA against the military industrial complex itself for personal profit, and “in fact, he has a North Korean submarine at his disposal because he told his boss he had sunk it (the counter-terrorism equivalent of taking home office supplies).” Vern primarily employs the time-honored technique of finding some line of dialogue or poster tagline and strategically re-using it against the film later in a different and unexpectedly hilarious context. But it works.

But despite what one might assume going into the book, Vern is not a “mean” critic. He is surprisingly gentle, sympathetic towards many of the characters in Seagal’s films, sensitive to forgotten plot points, and approves of Seagal’s political positions and that the actor manages to insert them into the template of this otherwise right-wing tilting genre.

I was a little worried diving into this book, because I’d just written a review of Seagal’s latest film, Kill Switch for the Vancouver Voice. I was concerned that my take on Seagal was too common, too knee jerk, especially after reading the first half of Seagalogy and garnering a deeper understanding and respect for Seagal’s career, thanks to Vern’s tearing away the assumptions and media hype. I was relieved, then, to see Vern catch up with Kill Switch at Ain’t It Cool News and express similar reservations. The film is just as inexplicable to Vern as it was to me (though Vern appears to have missed the promotional verbiage I saw somewhere that indicated that the film’s hero, Jacob King, travels the world tracking down and killing serial killers, which sort of explains the coda-ending.

In any case, Seagalogy is a great, fun book, clearly one of the best film books of the year, and it inspired me to order his first book, 5 on the Outside off of lulu.com, which is perhaps the highest testimony a reader can make.

All things, good and bad, must come to an end, and now this dire truth includes one of the best shows on British television, Foyle’s War. Recently aired on PBS, the final three episodes of the series, which take Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of Hastings to the very end point of WWII, whence he started out in May of 1940, 18 episodes and seven years earlier, the conclusion has recently been released on DVD by AcornMedia (AcornMedia, $49.99, street date, Tuesday, August 5). The three discs of Foyle’s War: Set 5 are a valediction and a celebration, as well as a long goodbye.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Foyle’s War is a nifty series about a socially reserved investigator in the south coast of England during the war years, but with the crimes he takes on at first seemingly pallid in comparison with the looming war. Michael Kitchen has an Anthony Hopkins-like reticence as Christopher Foyle, as he chews his lip and ruminates quietly over small details. His team is fairly stable: Honeysuckle Weeks as his batman, and Anthony Howell as his assistant. Foyle is widowed, but has a grown son in the RAF.

The first season of four movie-length episodes aired beginning in October of 2002 on Britain’s ITV, and the show was conceived from scratch by Anthony Horowitz, who had just come off of Midsomer Murders. Foyle’s War from the start beautifully recreated wartime England, was superbly photographed, and most important, offered interesting points of information about the times and an unvarnished portrayal of differing British reactions to the conflict, including such now near-forgotten aspects of the Home Front such as the looting of bombed out houses. For example two of the episodes in the second season reveal how some industrialists profited from the war. The series also reveals peculiarities of war time, such as “trekkers,” people who sleep in their cars far outside urban areas in order to avoid being bombed, and a term that sounded to me like “funcourts” (the set isn’t subtitled), which refers to well off Britishers who hide from the war in London by renting digs in B&Bs in obscure places. Curiously, the series has an interestingly bleak view of marriage, nearly each episode portraying a particularly harsh or violent union of one kind or another. The first four episodes covered stories set from May 1940 through summer. Season two covered September 1940 to October. Season three starts in February 1941 and goes to June. America’s season four (different from Britain’s) went from April 1942 to March, 1943. Finally, the last episodes take us from April 1944 to May 1945.

But what was best about Foyle’s War was that the mysteries were damned clever. I have never figured out a single one of them before the denouement, while the narrative journey of getting there was fascinating and entertaining.

I don’t know if there was a huge British bear hug that surrounded Foyle’s War, but there should have been There is a shot in the middle of the second episode in season three of fly-fishing that is so beautifully pastoral I had to believe that English viewers swooned over it. The series takes place in Hastings, location of the Battle of Hastings between King Harold II of England and Duke William of Normandy, a site that looms large in the British lexicon.

Foyle’s War does traffic in certain cliches about England and its emotional stillness and stiff upper lip, but might be the element that would attract more middlebrow English viewers. But creator Anthony Horowitz’s real achievement is to ransack the history of the era to find unusual yet highly indicative subject matter as plot premises.

Fans will recall that in the previous box set ends with Foyle resigning his post. Of course, we knew he would be hired back, and one of the main tasks of “Plan of Attack,” the first of the last three eps, is to reassemble the team, which requires that Foyle be summoned from the task of dictating his memoirs to find out who killed a highly strung and religious aerial map analyst. “Broken Souls” tracks two stories that intersect, one about the problems of returning vets, the other concerning a murder in a psychiatric institution. Finally, “All Clear” deals with a community attempting to adapt back to a non-war world, with a character from a previous episode returning to reveal that the wounds of war are not so easily healed.

Horowitz is a children’s author turned TV-movie writer and from the evidence of his own website, he is a very busy chap. His wife, Jill Green, produces the show and has written a book of her own about Foyle’s War that may appear someday as part of a complete series box set. That the makers of DVDs realize the rising esteem in which Foyle’s War is held finds evidence in the increasing number of supplements that appear on Acorn’s DVDs. Set five includes a 12-minute making-of documentary, along with text-based statements by two key cast members reflecting on the conclusion of the series, and a text-based account of a “real life” Foyle, plus, finally, cast filmographies. They are all indeed helpful but the first thing to do is simply watch the show, let the characters grow on you, and marvel at the cleverness of the mysteries. To that end, I highly recommend starting with Season 1 and going on from there. And, though I don’t usually say this, avoid spoilers at all costs.

Was there any film director who was at the same time both more British and yet more international in spirit than Michael Powell? On the one hand, he made the most bucolic, most pastoral of British films, celebrating the landscape, the character, and ambition of Britain, yet often took on exotic subjects and locations. Only Powell would have made Black Narcissus, or set a war movie in Holland or Canada. He often blended both elements in one film, to the ire of contemporaneous critics. Take The Small Back Room, a petite black and white drama which comes within the midst of several expansive color exocticisms, such as The Red Shoes (1948) and The Elusive Pimpernel (1950). There is hardly a more “British” film than this somber character study set during WWII. Yet Powell interrupts the proceedings at one point to entertain an expressionistic sequence that shows its hero grappling with alcoholism, a sequence with giant Scotch bottles and long shadows that comes across, as many others have pointed out, like the Dali sequence in Spellbound and the DTs in The Lost Weekend.

Of course there wasn’t only Powell, there also Emeric Pressburger, yet it wasn’t this Hungarian emigre who brought continentalism to the films, but Powell himself who was impatient with the stodginess of British cinema. They were one of the great partnerships brought together by an intuitive third party, like Laurel and Hardy and Wilder and Brackett. Pressburger is pegged as the writer half of the partnership, but as Charles Barr asserts convincingly in his audio commentary track for The Small Back Room, Pressburger was also important in the post-production stage, supervising the editing and helping to shape the final film. Pressburger anchored the film front end and back while Powell embarked on flights of fancy.

Powell seems simultaneously British and un-British. His films dwell on proper yet eccentric characters, yet veer toward the exotic. He embraced color, sparkling, smashing color, as an antidote to British grayness, and his films aren’t “smooth” and commercial; for that turn to Hitchcock, or compare Powell’s Contraband to Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent to see the difference between English oddity and a highly attuned commercial sense and vision. Contraband’s scrambled egg story makes it less predictable in a commercial sense but also interesting for all that, since it reflects a sensibility that refutes gross commercialism. As a storyteller, Powell is interested in process, procedures, details, mechanics, of the times and dates of things. In this he is a little like David Lean, whose career interests mirror Powell, going from intimate “small” films to elaborate international tales, though Lean, a location masochist, really went to difficult locales whereas Powell like to construct them on a set. Powell was also interested in “the arts” as a general, uplifting enterprise, like any well-meaning social engineer from the 1950s, and his films can be as “meaningful” or politically pointed as those of Stanley Kramer. Still, Powell’s films represent a stimulating blast from the past yet with a thoroughly modern sensibility, and they are a tonic to anyone feeling bogged down by the sameness and anonymity of modern films.

Based on a recent survey, I’ll guess that Powell is attracting among the best film criticism and writers, or at least was during a phase in the late 1990s. Though the scholars don’t seem to be much interested in Powell’s notion of “the composed film,” which goes unmentioned, for example, in Ian Christie’s excellent, fun Arrows of Desire, you can feel the excitement of the scholars that surges though their prose style and ideas and their attention to details. This wasn’t always the case, as is well known from the critical literature. Movie, my favorite film magazine, placed him in the fifth tier of directors, as part of a general antipathy toward British filmmakers in favor of the more vigorous American artists (with the exception, it appears, of the late Seth Holt). As a youth I inherited this prejudice, which I was recently able to trace back to questions and remarks that Truffaut made to Hitchcock in their interview book. All an aesthetic bigot needs, however, is a dose of Powell films to see that at least in this one filmmaker British filmmaking was in good hands.

To that end, there is an agreeable influx of Powell on DVD, not as much as presumably is available in R2, but enough to help fill out the collection or introduce Powell to newcomers. The earliest films offered up chronologically are two that are part of a package called Classic British Thrillers, from MPI. The offerings are two Powell quota quickies, of which Powell did about 15 in seven years, in this case Red Ensign from 1935, and The Phantom Light, from the same year. Red Ensign concerns a Scots industrialist impeded in his vision for implementing a new ship design by a recalcitrant board and a ruthless competitor. It’s curious how similar the Powell QQs, made without Pressburger, are to the films later made in collaboration with him. Red Ensign features a dynamic brash manipulator who is like a rough sketch of The Red Shoes’s Lemontov, who also steals another guy’s girl. The Phantom Light rhymes with Canterbury Tale. Like it, Light concerns a trio of new visitors to a town where they set forth to solve a local mystery (in this case a haunted lighthouse beam that lures ships to wreckage), whose progenitor has a watchful, though here dire, supervisory view over the village. Red Ensign is also filled with in jokes and quirky passages that appear to reflect attitudes on Powell’s mind about some of his employers and other people. The Phantom Light reveals that Powell is something of a leg man, with its insistent tendency to expose Binnie Hale’s gams through much of the running time.

A third film on the disc is the James Mason vehicle, The Upturned Glass, which the actor produced and which stars his wife as well. It’s a complex thriller from 1947 that juggles time in a rather modern way, anticipating Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, for example, and in its medical crisis passages and philosophy near the end, offers pallid versions of some of the concerns that preoccupied Powell and Pressburger in A Matter of Life and Death, and others. The film has an excellent score by Muir Mathieson and Bernard Stevens.

MPI’s Classic British Thrillers has no extras to speak of, but good transfers (for a contrast compare the film’s to Kino’s washed out Contraband disc, which came out in 2001), and hit the street, if you can find it, on Tuesday, July 29, 2008.

From the QQs, Powell went on to make The Edge of the World, which brought him to the attention of Alexander Korda, who hooked him up with Pressburger for The Spy in Black and Contraband, before assigning the director to help out with colorful, big budgeted The Thief of Bagdad, the kids film that remakes a Douglas Fairbanks silent. Criterion released a double disc version of the film on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008, and it should be a treat for those who favor “sense of wonder” films.

Personally, I’ve never been much interested in fantasy films, animation, or the sense of wonder, which is a matter of personal taste, though I do note that sense of wonder buffs seem to spend more time looking at blurs along blue screen image edges than expressing interest in stories. Thus, for me, most of contemporary cinema is closed off, of complete uninterest, and Thief of Bagdad is just a movie for children. It has a modicum of interest as a film that filmmakers found influential, and bits of Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Spielberg, and Lucas can be entertainingly tracked down in it. For example, in its domineering villain and kidnapping of a princess, and its partnership between a childlike kid and a cocksman, it presages Star Wars, and it anticipates other Powell images, such as the all-seeing eye, which is echoed in Powell from the camera obscura in A Matter of Life and Death and in the eye imagery of Peeping Tom.

Enthusiast Bruce Eder gives background in his audio commentary track, and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese share another one without overlapping. Curiously, in his commitment to showing how much the film influenced him, Coppola doesn’t mention the horse’s head that sits in the lap of the toy obsessed sultan. SoW boys will be satisfied with the video interviews with special effects experts Craig Barron, Dennis Muren, and Ray Harryhausen (who says he once saw the film’s giant spider lying discarded in a corner at the National General studios). But for Powell buffs, the treat is the war propaganda film that Powell helped make immediately after working on Thief, The Lion has Wings. It is antique and creaky, and was evidently screened as a comedy in Germany at the time, but good to have for completists. The disc also features a stills gallery and the original trailer, plus the usual 22-page booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer information, and two excellent essays, by Andrew Moor and Ian Christie.

Powell and Pressburger were eager to make The 49th Parallel, which was released in 1941, and became a Criterion two-disc set on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007, but which was, surprisingly, set in Canada, as it follows a team of German sailors on the run from an abandoned U boat who crisscross the nation, proselytize, meet resistance, and finally, as their numbers are reduced, face capture. Again it is a typically weird P&P movie, wholly unexpected in tone, setting, and more nuanced in political import than you expect for its time. P$&P essentially remade it from the other, but more “British” perspective a few years later in “One of Our Aircraft is Missing.”

Bruce Eder provides another informative audio commentary track, and the disc also presents a segment of the British news program Arena on Powell and Pressburger, “A Very British Affair,” supervised by Gavin Millar. Besides the trailer, there is also Powell’s further contribution to the war effort, The Volunteer, a recruitment film made with much input from Ralph Richardson, and a lengthy selection of audio tapes of Powell dictating or reading from his autobiography in process.

The most recent Powell film to hit DVDs and the immediate cause for these meditations is the P&P firm’s 1949 film The Small Back Room, one I’d surprisingly never heard of. Based on a novel by Nigel Balchin, one of those numerous British writers who toiled in near obscurity to the rest of the world but whose work enriched Brit Lit all through the 20th Century, the movie essentially tells the story of a man rendered impotent and his eventual achievement of potency. The man is Sammy Rice (Powell regular David Farrar), and fortunately he has the love of a good woman, Susan (the exotic Kathleen Byron) who also works with Sammy in an obscure, non-military science unit during the world (the film is set in 1943, in real time while P&P were making A Canterbury Tale). Sammy’s impotence is symbolized by a “tin foot,” a replacement right out of Maugham for a disablement incurred as a youth. It’s unclear if Sammy and Susan are having sex, though they live together, but she remains steadfast, and also sticks with him through bouts of alcoholism, which helps him forget his foot, and perhaps even his homosexual tendencies, which are hinted at obliquely in a nightclub scene (gay guilt wrestling also played a role in the book on which The Lost Weekend was based). Sammy’s specialty is fuses, and one main plot threat has a young soldier, Capt. Dick Stuart (the once venerable Michael Gough), urging Sammy to help with a series of cunning bombs dropped by the Germans that have been killing children. The extremely tense final movement of the film has Sammy finally coming up against one of the small cunning German explosives (those who recall the television series Danger UXB from 1979 will have a sense of the scene’s flavor). Naturally, a triumph over the phallic shaped device will also restore Sammy’s potency, but leave it to Powell and Pressburger to make even their “happy ending” ambiguous and perplexing.

The Small Back Room is a throwback, in a sense, to the kind of British film that people love and which P&P didn’t really make, set in a rain swept yet cozy world of cramped apartments and bureaucratic jobs, where the spirit of England is kept high despite privation and tormentous neuroses that don’t stop for the war. It’s a Brief Encounter sort of world, but P&P wouldn’t settle for such a thing. For one, they would steam it open like a rancid envelope and find out what’s really inside, and for another, they would find every opportunity to expand its playing field with passages of crazy visual extravagance. Over several viewings The Small Back Room grew to be a rich, nuanced work, and clearly one of Powell and Pressburger’s best films.

Supplements are a tad minimal for this film compared to the other recent Powell discs, but lead off with an excellent audio commentary track by film scholar Charles Barr, for whom Powell is one of several specialities. Barr is the first person I’ve heard mention average shot lengths in a track, and there is a nice moment when he pays tribute to the late Raymond Durgnat, one of my favorite writers and for a long time the lone voice of support for Powell amid critics of the 1960s.

Supplements include again audio tapes of Powell dictating or reading from his autobiography in progress, of which the chapter about a deleted scene is especially interesting, plus a video interview with Chris Challis, the cinematographer. The 16-page insert has an essay by Sight and Sound editor Nick James. The Small Back Room hits the streets on Tuesday, August, 19, 2008.

I’ve always wanted to write Roger Ebert and contribute one of those cliches he collects for his little movie glossary column (professional discretion and the fact that he probably already has my ideas in his list have prevented me). I’ve got two or three but the other day I was reminded of one of them while watching Mongol. In this cliche, whenever there is a blood oath drawn, the initiator takes a knife and attacks his hand like Jack the Ripper leaping upon Mary Jane Kelly, leaving a gash as big as the Joker’s grin on his palm, a cut that would take most of us to the ER for 36 stitches. There is a blood oath in Mongol. There is also a kid who falls through the ice of a frozen lake, a shot of a sunset with the sudden appearance of nomads over there at the right hand side of the frame marching into view, and many, many scenes of somber eating rituals. This is also a movie with repetitive stress syndrome. Every time time you tune back in, the Mongol of the title, Temudjin, the later Genghis Khan, is someone’s prisoner, yoked to a pillory for a few years of humiliation, before he escapes again, finds his family, has a ceremonial bowl of yak milk, and then goes off to unite the Mongols. Mongol is a bore, but it has a useful function as an anthology of all the cliches of modern movies, the sort of filmic affect that we seemingly require from movies these days in order for them to feel like movies to us, from the succession of short, unresolved bio-pic like scenes, to the gross and childish battle scenes with the silent flicker images. Then there is the music, god-awful, inappropriate, always running counter to what the scene seems to say or want, and an added dash of chloroform to an already deadly presentation. Naturally, director and writer Sergei Bodrov promises two more. Mongol is currently playing at the Hollywood Theatre.

The mysterious Alexandra DuPont over at Aiint it Cool News is on a roll. For the second week in a row the writer has taken on the big geek movie release, this time The X-Files: I Want to Believe, but it is safe to say that this time Ms. DuPont didn’t like the movie. For those who think that all internet writing is junk, DuPont exists as a shining refutation. Especially liked her joke about the stamp collection. My much more pallid review will appear in the August Vancouver Voice.